Jesus Made Matt Taibbi Puke

In need of a good weekend read? Check out this excerpt from Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi's new book The Great Derangement, in which he goes undercover at the weekend retreat of Christian Zionist, and McCain pal, John Hagee's Cornerstone Church in Texas Hill Country.

My disguise was modeled on other men I'd seen in church — pane glasses and the very gayest blue-and-white-striped Gap polo shirt I'd been able to find that afternoon. Buried on a clearance rack next to the underwear section in a nearby mall, the Gap shirt was one of those irritating throwbacks to the Meatballs/Seventies-summer-camp-geek look, but stripped of its sartorial irony, it really just screamed Friendless Loser! — so I bought it without hesitation and tried to match it with that sheepish, ashamed-to-have-a-penis look I had seen so many other young men wearing in church. With the glasses and a slouch I hoped I was at least in the ballpark of what I thought I needed to look like, which was a slow-moving hulk of confused, shipwrecked masculinity, flailing for an Answer.

Taibbi's weekend with Jesus concludes in bizarre fashion when the pastor leading the getaway encourages his parishioners to vomit in paper bags as he casts out the demons of "handwriting analysis" and "anal fissures."

If you need more reading material, also check out the Weekly's interview with Taibbi from last December -- where he compared America to (a then living) Ike Turner.